


Blind Man's Bluff

by theskywasblue



Category: Saiyuki
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Bloodplay, Ghosts, M/M, Speculation, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-09
Updated: 2010-07-09
Packaged: 2017-10-10 11:40:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/99336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theskywasblue/pseuds/theskywasblue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some messages need to be sent time and time again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blind Man's Bluff

**Author's Note:**

  * For [absolutenegation](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=absolutenegation).



> Originally written for the [yuletide_smut](http://community.livejournal.com/yuletide_smut/) giftfic exchange 2009.

He likes best the dark passageways, the silent corridors where the shadows cling to his heels like gaudy admirers, where there is only his breath and the sounds of his footfalls, although with his feet in sandals the cadence is slightly different than he is used to - and his own breathing - this time ragged and a little wet rather than calm and measured. Here he feels connected to the darkness, and pulled apart from the world.

He hurts. He's aware of the pain, how it makes his vision swim; aware of the smell of blood and the acid tang of it on his tongue, so familiar. The pain is cleansing, it strips him down to his base elements - greed, spattered with grief, with a trace of poisonous boredom lodged in there like a splinter.

There are no windows here, no moonlight. He leaves a bloody handprint on the wall outside the lab - _must remember...to clean that up before I go_ \- and there not even a stitched-on face to greet him, or empty glass eyes.

_And while I was still for the time to pass, a little grey thing came out of the grass. He sat down close where I could see, and his big still eyes looked hard at me..._

The lab has a small bathroom -- barely a closet -- with a sink, a mirror and a toilet. He doesn't turn on the light at first, just shucks his robes as quickly as possible to avoid getting any more blood on them, and squints at the shadowed face he sees reflected at him in the mirror above the sink. Without his glasses all the edges are loose, liable to melt away like shadows on a moonless night.

_Without light there is no shadow...so what does that make me, after all?_

He leans into the mirror, smearing blood across his forehead with his fingers, seeking the wound and pressing his fingertip against it, digging in with his fingernail until there is light behind his eyes. He knows it will scar beautifully, even if all he can see of his reflection is a swirl of red.

_"You know Ukoku, it's unwise to spend so much time contemplating your own reflection. It leads you to see imperfections that do not truly exist."_

The light snaps on, cold blue-white accompanied by the hum of the florescent tube. Blood drips off his chin and into the sink and the pain in his head is like death. He rubs his eyes and for a moment his vision resolves, clears, and there is a familiar face next to his in the mirror.

"Such contemplations do nothing for the heart or mind." Familiar fingers, gentle and warm, run across Ukoku's forehead, wiping away some of the blood, but simultaneously reopening the wound where it has begun to clot, causing a fresh rivulet to run down the bridge of his nose. "Life is too short to be spent worrying over what we cannot change."

"Koumyou..." Ukoku's laughter cracks in his throat. Perhaps there _is_ a bullet in his skull after all, lodged in his frontal cortex, disrupting neural pathways, re-routing electrical impulses. If not for the pulse thundering in his temples, sending bolts of pain through his forehead and down his neck he might even believe he was dead.

The toilet paper sticks to Ukoku's fingers as he dabs the blood away. There is a cloth within arm's reach, but it's better to use something he can dispose of after the fact. When he leaves, he plans to take everything with him. Nearly everything - data disks, flash drives. He'll put the paper printouts in the garbage; burn them, at least the important ones, although, it's not as if Hwan could make heads or tails of anything left behind. She, and the so-called lady of the castle will learn soon enough that the illustrious Nii Jianyi has been playing blind man's bluff with them.

Bunny will have to stay; he'll need to be stitched up first, though.

Koumyou puts down the stainless steel toilet lid, takes a seat, and lights up his pipe. The familiar earthy-sweet scent of fresh tobacco quickly fills the small bathroom.

"You know," Ukoku says finally, still studying his reflection with vision that has blurred over once more, trying to decide exactly how badly he wants this to be a dream or not, "it's not really fair, making a bet if you're just going to throw the game anyway."

Koumyou laughs softly, "I don't recall there being any limits placed on our tactics."

"_Dying_," Ukoku grinds out, jaw clenched so tight that he can feel the roots of his teeth shifting inside his gums, "is not a tactic."

"Yet it seems to have worked remarkably well so far."

Ukoku would like to think that neither of them has won just yet, that the game stands 100 to 99 - though in whose favour he does not know - and that each is always one breath away from turning the tables on the other, very much like that one seemingly endless night they played Xiangqi until dawn in a tawdry little inn in Yichang, afterwards deciding that neither of them had won and the time between sunrise and sunset was best spent exploring the various pursuits of the flesh, rather than those of the mind.

Ukoku's fingers seek out the first aid kit in the cabinet above the sink by memory. He has never felt the need to use it before, even for the wounds left on him by Koushu's eager claws and teeth, but he can't conceivably walk around with blood running into his eyes. It's conspicuous.

It occurs to him, as he tapes a thick square of gauze to his forehead, that in the years since they first made their bet, things between him and Koumyou have gone so far afield that it might be impossible to determine when the game is set to end. At this point, Ukoku's not even sure he can tell who might be winning. Worse, for a moment he's not even sure if he cares.

"Your tactics aren't the sort I would have agreed to either," Koumyou says finally. "Although they are very much what I would have expected from you."

"We are not having this conversation."

Koumyou blows a long pillar of sweet smoke towards the bathroom's low ceiling, "What would you rather talk about then?"

"Not this conversation. Not any conversation with you. I have a head injury."

He wants to laugh; he really does, because the whole situation is so entirely farcical. Hundreds of nights he sat talking to the moon, or to a stuffed rabbit under his arm, and _this_ of all things seems insane to him?

Koumyou finishes his pipe, reaches over and dumps the ash into the sink. A sudden, desperate need for nicotine constricts Ukoku's throat, and he stumbles out of the bathroom, seeking out his desk and the pack of cigarettes he remembers leaving in the bottom drawer. There is an extra pair of glasses there as well, though putting them on does not make Koumyou vanish; instead the man remains, a patient observer. If his footfalls make a sound on the lab's stone floor, it is lost beneath the roar of blood in Ukoku's ears as his mind churns though everything he has yet to do. It feels like there is machinery grinding between his ears.

Ukoku smokes a cigarette without hurrying, watches Koumyou sift through the debris littering his desk, as if there could be something there a dead man might be interested in when there is hardly anything that Ukoku - who is more or less alive most days - can even look at without gagging. Finally, Ukoku forces himself to sit behind the desk, to turn on the computer screen. Its dull glow burns his eyes, makes his temples throb more intensely than ever. He has hours yet to affect his escape, but with Koumyou looking over his shoulder, his need to slough off everything of the dead skin that was Nii Jianyi seems all the more urgent.

He cannot help but cast a glance towards the bathroom, grateful that he does not find his own body there, collapsed in a pool of blood.

He plugs his personal flash drive into the USB port, sets all the documents in a very particular folder to copy to it. The computer helpfully informs him it will take somewhere around thirty-nine minutes.

He leaves it to do its work, spins in his chair, and looks at Koumyou.

"You're still here."

Koumyou leans against Hwan's desk, picks up her coffee mug and turns it over in his hands. "Am I not welcome?"

"You're dead."

Ukoku isn't sure whether he's relieved that Koumyou doesn't argue the point. Instead the older man asks, "Does that trouble you?"

_Trouble_ isn't the word. Being out of coffee and cigarettes _troubles_ Ukoku; having a sliver of glass in the bottom of his foot _troubles_ Ukoku. Being without Koumyou for the better part of eleven years...there is no word for that, even in Ukoku's extensive and colourful internal lexicon.

"Why now? Don't tell me I'm going to die."

"_If I'm not in an eat or be eaten situation, I don't feel alive_. Didn't you say that to me once?"

Ukoku swipes a hand across his face, "Yes."

"But that only applies if you are doing the eating, ultimately," Koumyou chuckles.

And fine, he's a hypocrite, he has never denied that. To live is to be a hypocrite with every breath that you take.

Suddenly, Koumyou's fair, fine-boned face turns sad, as easily and quickly as a shadow passing over the surface of the moon. "You never change, Ukoku."

Ukoku lights another cigarette, sucks back a heady lungful of bitter smoke and blows out a series of rings. "Whatever wisdom you have come to impart Koumyou - spare me. I don't want lessons, promises or proverbs. There are no gods, there is no heaven, and there is no Koumyou Sanzo."

Koumyou straightens up, takes a long, slow breath and lets it out. Ukoku watches his shoulders swing forward and back, thinking that this is the most elaborate vision or hallucination or near-death experience any man has ever had if his subconscious is providing oxygen to a non-entity. Then Koumyou steps forward, carefully, as if approaching a wary rabbit, and puts his hand on Ukoku's cheek.

The hand is warm and so familiar - a little roughened at the finger tips and on the high part of the palm from years of martial arts instruction, but perfectly soft elsewhere - that for a moment Ukoku stops breathing.

_All that exists is what I can touch..._

Longing is something Ukoku understand acutely, even if he has never articulated it. He has longed for knowledge, he has longed for freedom, for relief from boredom, for the universe to look down and recognize that he existed; but there has never been a longing like this.

He opens his mouth to say - he can't even fathom what - and Koumyou takes his cigarette, dropping it into the ashtray next to the keyboard behind Ukoku's shoulder and slips a finger past his lips, lets it sit, careful and trusting, on Ukoku's tongue. Slowly, Ukoku closes his jaw, and sucks on Koumyou's finger, lets his tongue wind around the digit. Koumyou's breathing is steady, but colour starts to rise in his cheeks. It's all sensory memory, Ukoku thinks, the texture of that skin, the flavour of it - tobacco and salt and sandalwood musk. But even knowing that it must all be an illusion, some product of a mind exhausted, stressed and damaged, Ukoku cannot stop tasting Koumyou's skin until Koumyou draws his fingers away, trails them along Ukoku's jaw and down his throat, then brings them back to touch his cheek again.

Reality is a lead weight on a rope around Ukoku's neck; he can feel it pulling at him, choking off his air as Koumyou strokes his cheek, careful and slow. Ukoku knows that it will drag him down eventually, and he wonders if it will be like losing Koumyou all over again. But then he thinks that nothing could be like that again, if only because he has removed that part of himself, killed it off the way a tumour is killed with targeted radiation. He closes his eyes and sinks into his chair, waits for all the sensations to dissipate, for his scrambled neurons to lose the memory-sensation of Koumyou's touch. The fingers slide along Ukoku's throat, pressing very lightly against his Adam's apple as if to remind him of their ability to cut off his air, and then lower along his sternum, over his stomach, until they touch the waistband of his jeans and halt there.

Ukoku opens his eyes and finds Koumyou's are locked with them, their noses nearly touching, their breaths tangling together in the bare inches between their lips. Ukoku doesn't realize that the gasp he hears is his own.

He has had dreams like this before, in the lab in the dead of night, his eyes blurred and head pounding from too many hours of reading endless lines of data off computer screens: dreams of tasting Koumyou's lips, of feeling Koumyou's hands on his body. Of course it is normally his own hands that he feels, and no dream has ever been as real as this one; never has he actually hallucinated, dreamed, or even so clearly remembered the taste of sake and sweet tobacco on Koumyou's tongue.

Koumyou's lips trail down his throat, finding the skin just above his pulse point, applying suction slow and hard as Ukoku's hand goes to the front of his jeans, wanting desperately to release his cock which is pressing sudden and solid against his fly; he wants to come while these sensations - whether they are real or imagined no longer matters - are fresh in his mind. He is just closing a cool hand around his cock when a jolt of pain runs down his arm.

"Fuck!"

Koumyou clucks his tongue in disapproval and then uses that same tongue to lap up the tiny rivulet of blood trickling from the wound his teeth have left. Ukoku takes the hint, digs his fingers into the armrest of the chair, allows himself sink into the seat a little farther, and watches precome bead on the purpled head of his cock. He imagines Koumyou's elegant fingers curling around his length, Koumyou's thumb spreading that bead of moisture across his slit, dragging against his foreskin until it slips down, exposing keenly vulnerable flesh to the almost painful heat of Koumyou's tongue. But somehow, his imagination isn't directing this encounter. Instead Koumyou's fingers play against the bite mark on Ukoku's shoulder, smearing a fresh trickle of blood and tracing patterns on Ukoku's skin in brilliant red.

"Koumyou..." His voice sounds like he's begging. How many nights had he whispered that same name, thrusting into his own fist by the light of a computer monitor as one of his thousands of experiments ran, just staving off crippling boredom, or satisfying an ache in his balls? It isn't any more real now, he thinks, than it was then, but oh how he wants it to be. "Touch me. Put your hand on my dick..."

"So vulgar, Ukoku," Koumyou's voice is barely a whisper, "is that really necessary?"

The bead of moisture rolls down Ukoku's cock, drips onto the chair; Koumyou's fingers skate around his bellybutton leaving little streaks of red and Ukoku thinks that the blood might not all be his, but the only thing he wants is that hand, bloodied or not, around his cock, dragging out his orgasm. Just the brush of a fingertip against his shaft and Ukoku's whole body jumps against the chair, his breath hissing out through his teeth. Koumyou's finger slides higher, teasing the swollen crown of Ukoku's cock until Ukoku feels the foam of the armrests give way under the pressure of his grip, finally letting his head loll back against the chair, letting his eyes slip closed as the throbbing ache in his balls blessedly supersedes the one in his skull.

As Koumyou at long last curls his fingers around Ukoku's length, coaxing his orgasm out in slow, steady strokes, he presses his lips to the skin under Ukoku's ear and whispers something that Ukoku cannot hear.

The speakers of the computer issue a sharp, musical tone that Ukoku ignores at first, caught up in the slow, spinning darkness of a mind wiped clean by the relief of orgasm. When he does relent and opens his eyes it is his own hand he finds wrapped longingly around his softened cock, and the computer screen blinks at him, black save for a single line of stark white text:

_File transfer complete..._

-End-


End file.
